LinkAider is free for 500 page crawls every month but I liked its reporting so much that it still receives 4 stars from me. Submit a website URL, specify the number of pages to crawl and basically you are done. Now wait for the tool to complete the task and get a solid report.

Here’s the screenshot of the report summary (naturally, there are also detailed reports for each section or issue):

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. Ann's expertise in blogging and tools serve as a base for her writing, tutorials and her guest blogging project, MyBlogGuest.com.

12 thoughts on “3 Broken Link Checkers Reviewed and Compared”

Thanks for this roundup Ann. We use Xenu regularly and it’s awesome. Although I concur with you on getting stuck on big sites – sometimes it gets in a loop too which can crash the whole system. But it’s the best out there that I’ve come across.

Another one I think deserves special mention is http://www.linkpatch.com – it’s a user-triggered broken link checker – any time an actual user hits a 404 page, it pings you an email telling you what referring page they came from, their IP, country and browser. It’s awesome. But you do have to pay for it (after the free trial) – well worth it IMO.

Using google webmaster tools to check my links for me. So much better than anything on your list. Nice list anyhow though. Webmaster tools gives you all the 404 and all the pages linking to those 404 so you can fix them or contact them if they’re external. Couldn’t be easier.

Nice reviews. I use webmaster tools and xenu regularly to check for broken links. Xenu is also good for analyzing broken links of authority sites, for link building purposes, then send a friendly email to the authority site mentioning their broken link(s) and ‘subtly’ suggest an alternative (i.e. my link) to use.

I’ve recently started using Link Examiner. It’s a pretty solid little tool with some really cool features. In the past I would use Xenu regularly or just use Google Webmaster Tools for crawl errors.

The nice thing about Link Examiner is that it shows you error codes, gives you some SEO info (Is it missing titles, descriptions, etc.). What I like most about it is that it lets you right click on a link and you have the options to open it in a browser, copy it to your clipboard, view a list of all pages that link to the page reporting an error, etc. And if you need to provide the data to someone else, like a web designer or your boss, whoever it also has a nice little reporting feature which let’s you export the list of links to text, CSV, and HTML files.

It’s a nice little tool if you are looking for something that is free and reliable.

The SEO plugin for IIS 7 that was released to beta a few months ago searches for broken links for you among several other things. You need to have IIS 7 obviously, but it works on any site, not just those hosted on your IIS server. You just give it the URL and how many links to crawl, and it goes at it. It isn’t quick, but the report appears to work with any sized site and is free if you have IIS. You can export the report to a CSV which you can then work with in Excel as well.

Yea, more than the main three should be reviewed here, as well as some actual review standards. What do we, as optimizers, need from these sites? Does the site provide this? What does one do that that others should? Etc?

To Ann:The problem with getting stuck in huge sites is related to the sitemap. Since version 1.3 (20.12.2008), Xenu has an abort box there. (Of course you can also disable the sitemap) Obviously, a 100000 URL site would have a huge sitemap.

To Jaamit: Contact me if you think you can reproduce this (send me a .XEN file that is shortly before it crashes)… Xenu should definitvely not crash the whole system, because it doesn't do any low level stuff.

To Ann:The problem with getting stuck in huge sites is related to the sitemap. Since version 1.3 (20.12.2008), Xenu has an abort box there. (Of course you can also disable the sitemap) Obviously, a 100000 URL site would have a huge sitemap.

To Jaamit: Contact me if you think you can reproduce this (send me a .XEN file that is shortly before it crashes)… Xenu should definitvely not crash the whole system, because it doesn't do any low level stuff.

Surely I’ll go for Xenu Broken Link Checker, I don’t know when but I found it downloaded on my hard drive and just finished insatalling ! Let’s see how it works and is it worth using or not. Thanks Ann Smarty for reviewing this….